At its board meeting this afternoon, the Wake County Commission will hear an update on the county’s plans to eventually relocate the public library that operates inside Athens Drive High School in Southwest Raleigh. No vote is scheduled, but that likely won’t stop the library’s neighbors from showing up in force, many with little blue-and-orange […]
Jeffrey C. Billman
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Hold it, Raleigh
So remember a few weeks back, when we told you that the city of Raleigh had seemingly backed down on its outdoor-drinking crackdown (“Blunt-force trauma,” June 17)? Yeah … about that. Quick refresher: At the end of May the city proposed new rules to govern how private businesses can use public sidewalks, which according to […]
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Jeremy and Ziggy Sprinkle, now legal in all 50 states
As soon he heard the news, Jeremy Sprinkle went to the bar. He knew it was coming. Everyone did. They had been waiting for it all day. By midafternoon on Oct. 10, 2014, an overcast and unseasonably warm Friday, same-sex couples had lined up outside the Wake County Register of Deeds office as word broke […]
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“Feeling Good”: a Raleigh man on what today’s gay-marriage ruling means for him
“How’s it going, man?” “It’s fucking great!” I called Jeremy Sprinkle, the communications director for the N.C. AFL-CIO—and, disclosure, someone in my short time here I’ve come to think of as a friend—about an hour after the Supreme Court ruling came down. He was, in a word, ecstatic, so much so that he left work […]
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Raleigh landlord Bhola Gupta arrested for allegedly breaking into his own house, stealing tenants’ stuff
On June 20, Raleigh landlord Bhola Gupta, 77, was arrested on a felony charge of breaking and entering a house he owns and rents on Curfman Avenue, according to police records. According to the complainant, Antonia Bell, and a police incident report obtained by the INDY Thursday afternoon, while he was inside her house Gupta […]
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Conservatives’ horrible, no good, very bad week—now with gay marriage!
This morning, as expected, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 majority that gay marriage was indeed a constitutional right, prompting what will surely be no small amount of teeth-gnashing by religious conservatives and old people, the last bastions of antigay resistance. Per the ruling, written by Justice Kennedy (via SCOTUSblog): “No union is more […]
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Congrats, North Carolina poors: You can keep your health care, says Supreme Court
So this week we told you about King v. Burwell, a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that could have eliminated subsidies for those who accessed health care through the federal health care exchange, rather than state-level exchanges. In short, in North Carolina, that would have meant more than 450,000 would probably lose their health […]
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450,000 North Carolinians could lose health care subsidies
UPDATE: See our latest blog post on the ruling from the Supreme Court. If you pay attention to the newsand since you read this wildly popular column with the fevered devotion of a tongues-speaker at a tent revival, we’ll assume you doyou know that in the next week or so, the Supreme Court is going […]
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What’s driving the N.C. Senate’s animus toward the state’s metros?
At its core, the budget Republicans in the state Senate passed last week is less a financial document than a manifesto, a Christmas list of conservative pipe dreams. There are the predictable corporate and income tax cuts (though the regressive sales tax will be expanded and a tax break for nonprofits will be curtailed) and […]
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Guns don’t kill people. Racist pricks with easy access to guns kill people.
Yeah, I know. It is Too Early to “politicize” the latest in a way-too-long-and-growing list of mass shootings. It is Not The Right Time to talk about gun fetishization or systemic racism or any of the things that actually contributed to Dylann Storm Roof, an antisocial, pill-popping, maybe mentally ill, definitely disturbed 21-year-old with a […]
